New Releases by Sonja Cherry-Paul

"When can we move beyond representation to liberation?" This question from a young Black girl moved New York Times #1 bestselling author Dr. Sonja Cherry-Paul to offer a vision for antiracist teaching that goes far beyond adding diverse texts in a classroom library. Antiracist Reading Revolution provides an actionable antiracist teaching framework and models how K-8 educators can create opportunities for transformative reading and discussions in classrooms. Dr. Cherry-Paul offers six critical lenses that help educators to adopt an antiracist teaching stance, spotlighting the importance of instruction built around love, joy, community, justice, and solidarity. Educators are invited to reflect on their instructional practices, dismantle ideologies that are barriers to students’ critical and creative thinking and cultivate identity-inspiring learning experiences where students can show up fully as themselves and recognize the full humanity of all people. This is what it means to move beyond representation to liberation. Chapters feature several children’s books that center BIPOC characters and creators. Dr. Cherry-Paul provides prompts and pathways for each children’s book that guide teachers toward putting into action the six critical lenses at the core of the Antiracist Reading Framework – affirmation, awareness, authorship, atmosphere, activism, and accountability. And she provides toolkits for students and teachers to use when selecting and reading books on their own. Chapters in this book also ... Offer personal and insightful anecdotes, supported by research and scholarship, that illustrate the power of antiracist teaching in working toward equity, justice, and freedom Provide a clear and actionable guide for K-8 literacy educators including classroom teachers, instructional coaches, and librarians Encourage critical reflection, pausing to ask educators to examine their own identities and values, and how these influence their teaching Guide educators toward selecting and teaching with books that center the lived experiences of BIPOC students This book is a call to action. In Dr. Cherry-Paul’s words, "In an antiracist classroom, reading helps us to dream, experience joy, engage in collective struggle, liberate our minds, and love. Let’s move forward together to realize our vision of an antiracist reading classroom rooted in love and liberation."

This unit is about cultural relevance and getting teens to fall in love with books that are deeply meaningful to the lives they are living right now. The unit will introduce young people to some of the great writers of their generation, the writers who are writing for them, and will create powerful opportunities for teens to share their voices, and find their places, in school and in the world. Across the unit, readers will: Deepen their comprehension, studying summaries and reviews in preparation for reading and developing their own analytical summarising techniques; Consider transactional reading practices, identifying the ways that readers bring their own identities to a text and the ways that these identities shape their responses; Be innovative in their writing about reading, annotating and taking longer-form notes in reading notebooks to engage more deeply with texts and other readers; Investigate power dynamics, power systems, and sources of power through theoretical lenses; Become literacy activists, learning to speak seriously and passionately about books they choose to read and recommend to book club peers. The goal of this unit is to teach contemporary literature in a way that empowers our students as democratic readers and thinkers, and young activists. The Units of Study for Teaching Reading series saves teachers hundreds of hours of planning, freeing time for analysing student work, working with individuals and small groups, and for studying with colleagues. The series provides teachers with the tools and support they need to move students quickly and efficiently toward grade-level expectations, while also helping kids become proficient, lifelong readers.

Foreword / Cornelius Minor Gratitude -- Creating a culture of reading through book clubs -- Organizing and setting up book clubs -- Launching and managing book clubs -- Lighting the fire of discussion -- Resources at a glance -- Living with books all year long.

The reflections of each of the teachers about their development and teaching of the racial-justice curriculum demonstrated the breakthroughs and boundaries of teaching about race and racism with predominantly White middle-school students. Further, their reflections illustrated the ongoing, internal work required to facilitate conversations about race with students more effectively. Such work included monitoring for how race affected their lives as well as the lives of others, and how race as one of their identities affected the ways in which they developed and taught curriculum. Finally, the teachers discovered that facilitating courses on race required moving from a content-based approach to a consciousness-based approach where they each, alongside of their students, assumed a researching-the-world stance to learn about race and confront and challenge racism.

How many times during writing workshop have you thought, "If only I could clone myself!" Dana and Sonja have a solution for finding more one-on-one teaching time: flipped learning. Imagine students having access to instruction and support when they need it. While not a replacement for you, the teacher, flipped learning allows students to: access a variety of minilessons on their own; work at their own pace to study the minilesson; move ahead or review concepts, depending on individual needs. Meanwhile, you''ll have more time to maximize individualized instruction and conferring. Dana and Sonja walk you through the how''s and why''s of flipped learning, and illustrate what it looks like in a writing workshop by modeling a flipped lesson. Whether you''re a nove or an advanced technology user, you''ll find tech tips throughout the book that help you choose the right tools and resources for creating flipped lessons and incorporating them into your workshop. Discover how a blended approach using flipped learning can increase efficiency in your writing workshop, while fostering independent learning at the same time. -- from back cover.

"What does interpretation really mean? What does it look like in the classroom? How can we effectively teach students at all reading levels to be successful at constructing interpretations?"-- Back cover.